romantic movement essay

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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Romanticism

Summary of Romanticism

At the end of the 18 th century and well into the 19 th , Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment . The artists emphasized that sense and emotions - not simply reason and order - were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative, subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde movements well into the 20 th century. Romanticist practitioners found their voices across all genres, including literature, music, art, and architecture. Reacting against the sober style of Neoclassicism preferred by most countries' academies, the far reaching international movement valued originality, inspiration, and imagination, thus promoting a variety of styles within the movement. Additionally, in an effort to stem the tide of increasing industrialization, many of the Romanticists emphasized the individual's connection to nature and an idealized past.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• In part spurred by the idealism of the French Revolution, Romanticism embraced the struggles for freedom and equality and the promotion of justice. Painters began using current events and atrocities to shed light on injustices in dramatic compositions that rivaled the more staid Neoclassical history paintings accepted by national academies.
• Romanticism embraced individuality and subjectivity to counteract the excessive insistence on logical thought. Artists began exploring various emotional and psychological states as well as moods. The preoccupation with the hero and the genius translated to new views of the artist as a brilliant creator who was unburdened by academic dictate and tastes. As the French poet Charles Baudelaire described it, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
• In many countries, Romantic painters turned their attention to nature and plein air painting, or painting out of doors. Works based on close observation of the landscape as well as the sky and atmosphere elevated landscape painting to a new, more respectful level. While some artists emphasized humans at one with and a part of nature, others portrayed nature's power and unpredictability, evoking a feeling of the sublime - awe mixed with terror - in the viewer.
• Romanticism was closely bound up with the emergence of newly found nationalism that swept many countries after the American Revolution. Emphasizing local folklore, traditions, and landscapes, Romanticists provided the visual imagery that further spurred national identity and pride. Romantic painters combined the ideal with the particular, imbuing their paintings with a call to spiritual renewal that would usher in an age of freedom and liberties not yet seen.

Key Artists

Overview of Romanticism

When he was four years old, William Blake had a vision of "the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!" Later, expressed in his poetry and visual art, his prophetic visions and belief in the "real and eternal world" of the imagination resulted in the unknown artist being acknowledged as the "father of Romanticism."

Artworks and Artists of Romanticism

The Nightmare

Artist: Henry Fuseli

Fuseli's strange and macabre painting depicts a ravished woman, draped across a divan with a small, hairy incubus sitting on top of her, staring out menacingly at the viewer. A mysterious black mare with white eyes and flaring nostrils appears behind her, entering the scene through lush, red curtains. We seem to be looking at the effects and the contents of the woman's dream at the same time. Fuseli's ghastly scene was the first of its kind in the midst of The Age of Reason, and Fuseli became something of a transitional figure. While Fuseli held many of the same tenets as the Neoclassicists (notice the idealized depiction of the woman), he was intent on exploring the dark recesses of human psychology when most were concerned with scientific exploration of the objective world. When shown in 1782 at London's Royal Academy exhibition, the painting shocked and frightened visitors. Unlike the paintings the public was used to seeing, Fuseli's subject matter was not drawn from history or the bible, nor did it carry any moralizing intent. This new subject matter would have wide-ranging repercussions in the art world. Even though the woman is bathed in a bright light, Fuseli's composition suggests that light is unable to penetrate the darker realms of the human mind. The relationship between the mare, the incubus, and the woman remains suggestive and not explicit, heightening the terrifying possibilities. Fuseli's combination of horror, sexuality, and death insured the image's notoriety as a defining example of Gothic horror, which inspired such writers as Mary Shelly and Edgar Allan Poe.

Oil on canvas - Detroit Institute of Art

The Ancient of Days from Europe a Prophecy copy B

Artist: William Blake

The Ancient of Days served as the frontispiece to Blake's book, Europe a Prophecy (1794), which contained 18 engravings. This image depicts Urizen, a mythological figure first created by the poet in 1793 to represent the rule of reason and law and influenced by the image of God described in the Book of Proverbs as one who "set a compass upon the face of the earth." Depicted as an old man with flowing white beard and hair in an illuminated orb, surrounded by a circle of clouds, Urizen crouches, as his left hand extends a golden compass over the darkness below, creating and containing the universe. Blake combines classical anatomy with a bold and energetic composition to evoke a vision of divine creation. Blake eschewed traditional Christianity and felt instead that imagination was "the body of God." His highly original and often mysterious poems and images were meant to convey the mystical visions he often experienced. Europe a Prophecy reflected his disappointment in the French Revolution that he felt had not resulted in true freedom but in a world full of suffering as reflected in England and France in the 1790s. Little known during his lifetime, Blake's works were rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites at the end of the 19 th century, and as more artists continued to rediscover him in the 20 th century, he has become one of the most influential of the Romantic artists.

Relief etching with hand coloring - Glasgow University Library, Glasgow Scotland

Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa

Artist: Antoine Jean Gros

This painting depicts Napoleon I, not yet the Emperor, visiting his ailing soldiers in 1799 in Jaffa, Syria, at the end of his Egyptian Campaign. His troops had violently sacked the city but were subsequently stricken in an outbreak of plague. Gros creates a dramatic tableau of light and shade with Napoleon in the center, as if on a stage. He stands in front of a Moorish arcade and touches the sores of one of his soldiers, while his staff officer holds his nose from the stench. In the foreground, sick and dying men, many naked, suffer on the ground in the shadows. A Syrian man on the left, along with his servant who carries a breadbasket, gives bread to the ill, and two men behind them carry a man out on a stretcher. While Gros' teacher Jaques Louis David also portrayed Napoleon in all of his mythic glory, Gros, along with some of David's other students, injected a Baroque dynamism into their compositions to create a more dramatic effect than David's Neoclassicism offered. Gros' depiction of suffering and death, combined with heroism and patriotism within an exotic locale became hallmarks of many Romantic paintings. The use of color and light highlights Napoleon's gesture, meant to convey his noble character in addition to likening him to Christ, who healed the sick. Napoleon commissioned the painting, hoping to silence the rumors that he had ordered fifty plague victims poisoned. The work was exhibited at the 1804 Salon de Paris, its appearance timed to occur between Napoleon's proclaiming himself as emperor and his coronation.

Oil on canvas - Musée du Louvre, Paris France

The Third of May 1808

Artist: Francisco Goya

This groundbreaking work depicts the public execution of several Spaniards by Napoleonic troops. On the left, lit up against a hill, a man in a white shirt holds out his arms as he kneels and faces the firing squad. Several men cluster around him with facial expressions and body language expressing a tumult of emotion. A number of the dead lie on the ground beside them and, to their right, a group of people, all with their faces in their hands, knowing they will be next. On the right, the firing squad aims their rifles, forming a single faceless mass. A large square lantern stands between the two groups, dividing the scene between shadowy executioners and victims. The painting draws upon the traditional religious motifs, as the man in the white shirt resembles a Christ-like figure, his arms extended in the shape of the cross, and a close-up of his hands reveals a mark in his right palm like the stigmata. Yet, the painting is revolutionary in its unheroic treatment, the flatness of its perspective, and its matte almost granular pigments. Additionally, its depiction of a contemporary event experienced by ordinary individuals bucked academic norms that favored timeless Neoclassical vignettes. Goya intended to both witness and commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's army during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, a war marked by extreme brutality. The painting's dark horizon and sky reflect the early morning hours in which the executions took place, but also convey a feeling of overwhelming darkness. The art historian Kenneth Clark described it as, "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention." Goya's revolutionary painting would be instrumental in the rise of Realism's frank depictions of everyday life, of Picasso's declarations against the horrors of war, and the Surrealists' exploration of dream-like subject matter.

Oil on canvas - Museo del Prado, Madrid Spain

La Grande Odalisque

Artist: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

This painting depicts a reclining nude, a member of a harem, holding a feathered fan amidst sumptuous textiles. Her hair is wrapped in a turban, and a hookah sits at her feet. She turns her head over her shoulder to peer out at the viewer. Ingres was one of the best known of the Neoclassical painters, and while he continued to defend the style, this work reflects a Romantic tendency. The image recalls Titan's Venus of Urbino (1528) and echoes the pose of Jacque-Louis David's Portrait of Madame Récamier (1809), but a Mannerist influence is also apparent in the figure's anatomical distortions. Her head is a little too small, and her arms do not appear to be the same length. When the work was shown at the 1819 Salon, these distortions prompted critics to claim she had no bones, no structure, and too many vertebrae. The work is a well-known example of Orientalism. By placing a European nude within the context of a Middle-Eastern harem, the subject could be given an exotic and openly erotic treatment. Subsequent scholars have suggested that because the woman is a concubine in a sultan's harem, the distortions of her figure are symbolic, meant to convey the sultan's erotic gaze upon her figure. As a result, the work points the way to Romanticism's emphasis on depicting a subject subjectively rather than objectively or according to an idealized standard of beauty. Ingres's use of color and his flattening of the figure would be important examples for 20 th -century artists like Picasso and Matisse, who also eschewed classical ideals in their representations of individuals.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Artist: Caspar David Friedrich

In this painting, an aristocratic man steps out upon a rocky crag as he surveys the landscape before him, with his back turned toward the viewer. Out of swirling clouds of fog, tall pinnacles of rocks loom, and a majestic peak on the left and a rock formation on the right fill the horizon. Many of Friedrich's landscapes depict a solitary figure in an overwhelming landscape that stands in for a Byronic hero, overlooking and dominating the view. While Friedrich made plein air sketches in the mountains of Saxony and Bohemia in preparation for this painting, the landscape is essentially an imaginary one, a composite of specific views. The place of the individual in the natural world was an abiding theme of the Romantic painters. Here, the individual wanderer atop a precipice contemplating the world before him seems to suggest mastery over the landscape, but at the same time, the figure seems small and insignificant compared the sublime vista of mountains and sky that stretch out before him. Friedrich was a master of presenting the sublimity of nature in its infinite boundlessness and tempestuousness. Upon contemplation, the world, in its fog, ultimately remains unknowable.

Oil on canvas - Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg German

The Raft of the Medusa

Artist: Théodore Géricault

Géricault depicts the desperate survivors of a shipwreck after weeks at sea on a wave-tossed raft beneath a stormy sky. At the front of the raft, a black man waves a shirt trying to flag down a ship barely visible on the horizon, while behind him others struggle forward raising their arms in hope of rescue. In the foreground, a disconsolate older man holds onto the nude corpse of his dead son, the body of a man hangs off the raft trailing in the water, and to the far left lies a partial corpse, severed at the waist. The scene depicts the survivors of the wreck of the Medusa, a French Royal Navy frigate sent to colonize Senegal in 1816. The ship ran aground on a sandbank and began to sink, but there were not enough lifeboats. Some of the survivors built a makeshift raft to reach the African shore, but they were quickly lost at sea. Many died, and others resorted to violence and cannibalism. The artist did months of research, interviewing and sketching the survivors, dissecting cadavers in his studio, and recruiting friends to model, including the painter Delacroix. Géricault's use of light and shadow as well as organizing the scene along two diagonals creates a dramatic and intense vision. Beginning with the bodies in the lower left, the viewer follows the eyes and gestures of the raft's inhabitants to a man, borne on the shoulders of his companions, waving a cloth - a sign of hope. From the shadows below the sail, one follows another diagonal to the bottom right to see a corpse, partially shrouded, slipping off the raft into the sea. This organization, coupled with the majestic and stormy sky speaks to the Romantic tastes for the terrible and the sublime. Intended as a profound critique of a social and political system by depicting the tragic consequences and suffering of the marginal members of society, the painting is a pioneering example of protest art. The famous 19 th -century art critic Jules Michelet (who coined the term The Renaissance ) ascribed a broader view of Géricault's subject, suggesting that "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa."

The Hay Wain

Artist: John Constable

This rural landscape depicts a hay wain, a kind of cart, drawn by three horses crossing a river. On the left bank, a cottage, known as Willy Lott's Cottage for the tenant farmer who lived there, stands behind Flatford Mill, which was owned by Constable's father. Constable knew this area of the Suffolk countryside well and said, "I should paint my own places best, painting is but another word for feeling." He made countless en plein air sketches in which he engaged in near scientific observations of the weather and the effects of light. In Constable's landscape, man does not stand back and observe nature but is instead intimately a part of nature, just as the trees and birds are. The figuring driving the cart is not out of scale with his environment. Constable depicted the oneness with nature that so many of the Romantic poets declared. Constable found little acclaim in his home country of England because of his refusal to follow a traditional academic path and his insistence on pursuing the lowliest of genres: landscape painting. The French Romantics, however, took him up enthusiastically after seeing this work in the 1824 Paris Salon. His ability to capture the way fleeting atmosphere determines how we see the landscape inspired such artists as Eugène Delacroix. While The Hay Wain may not have been well-received by his countrymen at the time, in 2005 it was the voted second most popular painting in England.

Oil on canvas - The National Gallery, London

Liberty Leading the People (July 28, 1830)

Artist: Eugène Delacroix

This famous and influential painting depicts the Paris uprising in July 1830. Delacroix, though, does not present an actual event but an allegory of revolution. A bare-chested woman, representing the idea of Liberty, wears a Phryggian cap, carries a bayonet in one hand and raises the tricolor flag in the other, encouraging the rebellious crowd forward on their path to victory. While her figure and the dress draped over her body evokes the Greek classical ideal, Delacroix includes her underarm hair, suggesting a real person and not just an ideal. Other contemporary details and political symbols can be found in the portrayal of various classes of Parisian society. A boy, wearing a beret worn by students carries a cartridge pouch on his shoulder and his cavalry pistols, a factory worker brandishes a saber and wears sailor trousers with an apron, and a man wearing the waistcoat and top hat of fashionable urban society is perhaps a self-portrait of Delacroix. The wounded man who kneels at Liberty's feet and looks up at Liberty is a Parisian temporary worker. Each detail in the image carries political significance, as the beret with a white royalist and a red ribbon denotes the liberal faction, and a Cholet handkerchief, a symbol of a Royalist leader, is used to fasten a pistol to a man's abdomen. The right background is relatively empty, and though the towers of Notre Dame place the scene in Paris, parts of the urbanscape are purely imagined. Delacroix said of the work, "I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and although I may not have fought for my country, at least I shall have painted for her." He had witnessed the event, describing, "Three days amid gunfire and bullets, as there was fighting all around. A simple stroller like myself ran the same risk of stopping a bullet as the impromptu heroes who advanced on the enemy with pieces of iron fixed to broom handles." Delacroix used the dynamic pyramidal arrangement, chiaroscuro, and color to create a scene of clamorous drama that highlights heroism, death, and suffering, quintessential themes of the Romantic movement. Delacroix's bohemianism, his personal vision, and his refusal of academic norms, hallmarks of the Romantic attitude, made him a model for many modern artists.

The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm

Artist: Thomas Cole

The American Thomas Cole depicts a view of the winding Connecticut River from Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. A heavily wooded promontory overlooks a flat plain marked by cultivated fields where the wide river meandered over a long period of time and formed an oxbow, or bend, in its flow, and hills rise in the background. The diagonal created by the promontory divides the scene into two triangles, juxtaposing the stormy and green wilderness on the left with the sunlit and cultivated plains on the right. In the lower right, a single human figure, the artist himself, is depicted at work. Cole thus presents the artist in harmony with nature. Thomas Cole was among the most important and influential of the Hudson Valley School painters. While traveling in Europe from 1829-1832, the artist traced this view from Basil Hall's Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828 . Wanting to counter Hall's criticism of Americans as indifferent to their native landscape, Cole wanted to depict the uniqueness of the American landscape as "a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent." This Romantic concept found its way into future depictions of the American landscape by the likes of other painters and photographers, including Ansel Adams.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York New York

The Slave Ship

Artist: J.M.W. Turner

This painting depicts a seascape, the ocean a swirl of chaotic waves beneath a stormy sky that is lit up with red and yellow as if on fire. On the horizon, a ship with its sails unfurled appears to be headed directly into rough dark waters. Shackled human forms, some partially glimpsed, are scattered in the foreground like debris, as sharks and other fish circle and close in upon the flailing swimmers. Turner painted this image after reading Thomas Clarkson's The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808) that recounted how the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard so that he could collect the insurance payments on his human cargo. An ardent abolitionist, Turner hoped that the work would inspire Prince Albert to do more to combat slavery around the globe. Turner captured the philosopher Edmond Burke's concept of the "sublime," the feeling one senses in the presence of nature's overwhelming grandeur and power. In this image, the human figures, and even the ship on the horizon, are minuscule, and the emphasis on the water and the sky conveys a sense of humanity overwhelmed. The blood red color of the sky and the black caps of the waves convey the emotional intensity of the natural world, and the vertical ray of light from the sun that divides the ocean in half seems almost an apocalyptic vision, the presence of a divine witness. Turner's quick brush strokes create a sense of frenzy and chaos, overpowering the barely visible struggling human forms. His work influenced Romanticism's depiction of nature as a dramatic and tumultuous struggle.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Massachusetts

Beginnings of Romanticism

The term Romanticism was first used in Germany in the late 1700s when the critics August and Friedrich Schlegal wrote of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry"). Madame de Staël, an influential leader of French intellectual life, following the publication of her account of her German travels in 1813, popularized the term in France. In 1815 the English poet William Wordsworth, who became a major voice of the Romantic movement and who felt that poetry should be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," contrasted the "romantic harp" with the "classic lyre." The artists that considered themselves part of the movement saw themselves as sharing a state of mind or an attitude toward art, nature, and humanity but did not rely on strict definitions or tenets. Bucking established social order, religion, and values, Romanticism became a dominant art movement throughout Europe by the 1820s.

Literary Predecessors

An early prototype of Romanticism was the German movement Sturm und Drang , a term usually translated as "storm and stress." Though it was primarily a literary and musical movement from the 1760s to the 1780s, it had a great impact and influence on public and artistic consciousness. Emphasizing emotional extremes and subjectivity, the movement took its name from the title of the play Romanticism (1777) by Friedrich Maxmilian Klinger.

The most famous advocate of the movement was the German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) became a cultural phenomenon. Depicting the emotionally anguished story of a young artist who, in love with the woman who is engaged and then married to the artist's friend, commits suicide, the novel's popularity caused what came to be called "Werther Fever," as young men adopted the protagonist's clothing and manner. Some copycat suicides even occurred, and countries like Denmark and Italy banned the novel. Goethe himself renounced the novel as he later turned away from any association with Romanticism in favor of a classical approach. Nevertheless, the idea of the artist as a solitary genius, emotionally anguished, whose originality and imagination was spurned by the rational world, gripped public consciousness, becoming a model for the romantic hero of the subsequent era.

In the 1800s the British poet Lord Gordon Byron became a celebrity upon the publication of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), and the term "Byronic hero," was coined to denote the figure of the lone and brooding genius, torn between his best and worst traits.

Romanticism in the Visual Arts

Both the English poet and artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya have been dubbed "fathers" of Romanticism by various scholars for their works' emphasis on subjective vision, the power of the imagination, and an often darkly critical political awareness. Blake, working principally in engravings, published his own illustrations alongside his poetry that expressed his vision of a new world, creating mythical worlds full of gods and powers, and sharply critiquing industrial society and the oppression of the individual. Goya explored the terrors of irrationality in works like his Black Paintings (1820-23), which conveyed the nightmarish forces underlying human life and events.

In France, the painter Antoine-Jean Gros influenced the artists Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix who subsequently led and developed the Romantic movement. Chronicling the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte in paintings like Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa (1804), Gros emphasized the emotional intensity and suffering of the scene.

Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Eugene Delacroix's The Barque of Dante (1822) brought Romanticism to the attention of a larger public. Both paintings scandalized the Paris Salons that they were exhibited in, Géricault in 1820 and Delacroix in 1822. Deviating from the Neoclassical style favored by the Academy and using contemporary subject matter outraged the Academy and the larger public. The depiction of emotional and physical extremity and varied psychological states would become the hallmarks of French Romanticism .

Following Géricault's early death in 1824, Delacroix became the leader of the Romantic movement, bringing to it his emphasis on color as a mode of composition and the use of expressive brushwork to convey feeling. As a result, by the 1820s Romanticism had become a dominant art movement throughout the Western world.

In England, Germany, and the United States, the leading Romantic artists focused primarily on landscape, as seen in the works of the British artist John Constable , the German Caspar David Friedrich , and the American Thomas Cole , but always with the concern of the individual's relation to nature.

A Revolutionary Movement

Largely developing during the French Revolution, Romanticism was allied with a revolutionary and rebellious spirit. The rule of reason and law of the Enlightenment was perceived as confining and mechanistic. As a result, artists turned to scenes of rebellion and protest. Géricault intended The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), inspired by a true account of a shipwreck, as an indictment of the French government's policies that led to the tragedy. Similarly, Turner's The Slave Ship (1840) was intended to influence the British government into a more active abolition policy. Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) was created to support the uprising of the people of Paris against the restoration government of Charles X. Delacroix also painted a number of works depicting the Greek fight for independence against the Ottoman Empire. His Scène des massacres de Scio ( Massacre at Chios ) (1824) depicts the survivors of a massacre that occurred when the Ottoman Empire conquered an island of rebellious Greeks and killed or enslaved most of the inhabitants.

The Sublime

In 1756, the English philosopher Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , and in 1790, the German philosopher Emanuel Kant, who explored the relationship between the human mind and experience, developed Burke's notions in Critique of Judgment . The idea of The Sublime came to hold a central place in much of Romanticism in order to counter Enlightenment rationality. Burke explained, "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." To experience the sublime, one does not just experience something beautiful but something that overtakes one's rational sense of objectivity. The awe and terror experienced by observing a great storm or an infinite vista make the individual contemplate his or her place in the natural world. This state, though, necessitates that one is at some remove from what one is seeing, that one is not in danger of being physically harmed by the storm or lost in the wilderness. When one tries to comprehend the boundlessness, or formlessness, of nature's power, one feels overwhelmed emotionally. The experience of the sublime triggers self-examination that was crucial to Romanticism. Many Romantic painters sought to evoke the sublime in their landscape paintings, portraying stormy seas and skies witnessed by a solitary individual.

Orientalism

As early as the Renaissance, artists depicted the Middle East through exoticized images, as reflected in The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511) by an anonymous Venetian painter. As the art critic Andrew Graham Dixon described, the painting attempted to compress all that made Damascus "vivid and strange, to Venetian eyes, within the scope of a single canvas: figures in turbans; a laden camel on its way to the bazaar; the great Mosque; the citadel; the public baths; private houses and their distinctive, lush walled gardens." In the 19 th century a fascination with Middle-Eastern subjects overtook both Neoclassical and Romantic painting, as seen in treatments of the nude like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' Grande Odalisque (1814), or the popularity of harem scenes like Delacroix's The Women of Algiers (1834). Romantic painters projected desires, fears, and the unknown into their depictions of African and Middle Eastern scenes.

Subsequently, scholars have reevaluated these depictions of an exoticized Middle East. The cultural critic and historian Edward Said coined the term "Orientalism" with his influential book, Orientalism (1978). Said argued that in its depictions of the Middle East, Western art and literature showed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture." This prejudice was reflected in stereotypical depictions of Middle Eastern culture and people as primitive, irrational, and exotic.

Romanticism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Romanticism in germany.

During the Enlightenment, or The Age of Reason, German Romantic painters turned their sights to interior emotions instead of reasoned observations. They looked to previous eras, including the Middle Ages, for examples of men living in harmony with nature and each other. The Nazarenes, a group of painters founded in Vienna in 1809, favored medieval and early Italian Renaissance painting, repudiating the popular Neoclassical style preferred at the time. The leading German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich worked predominantly in landscape painting and explored man's relation to the land. Landscape painting became an allegory for the human soul as well as a symbol of freedom and boundlessness that subtly critiqued the political restrictedness of the time.

Romanticism in Spain

In the midst of the Peninsular War raged by Napoleon and the Spanish War of Independence, Spanish Romantic painters began exploring more subjective views of landscapes and portraits, valorizing the individual. Francisco de Goya was by far the most prominent of the Spanish Romantics. While he was the official painter for the Royal Court, toward the end of the 18 th century, he began exploring the imaginary, the irrational, and the horrors of human behavior and war. His works, including the painting The Third of May, 1808 (1814) and the series of etchings The Disasters of War (1812-15), stand as powerful rebukes of war during the Enlightenment era. Increasingly withdrawn, Goya made a series of Black Paintings (1820-23) that explored the terrors held within the innermost recesses of the human psyche.

Romanticism in France

After the Napoleonic Wars ended with Napoleon in exile, the Romantic painters began challenging the Neoclassicism of Jacques Louis David , the foremost painter during the French Revolution, and the overall Neoclassical style favored by the Academy. Unlike their German counterparts, the French had a larger repertoire of subjects that included portraiture and history painting. Artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix created many genre scenes of North Africa, ushering in a vogue for Orientalism , and their dramatically staged compositions of light and color highlighted the horrors of contemporary events and tragedies.

The French also developed a strong sculptural rendition of Romanticism. Géricault experimented in sculpture, creating Nymph and Satyr (1818), a piece that depicted a suggestive and violent encounter between the two mythological figures. He also created works like his Flayed Horse I (c. 1820-24) that combined his anatomical knowledge with the horse, one of his favorite subjects, within a dark and disturbing vision. Romanticist sculpture was drawn to scenes of beasts of prey and fighting animals in which the animals were depicted as a writhing surge of bodies. Portraying a savage beast overwhelming delicate beauty, such works were meant to convey the Romantic sense of terribiltà , the feeling of awe or terror created by the sublime. The most famous of animal sculptors was Antoine-Louis Bayre, whose bronze works like Tiger Surprising an Antelope (c. 1835) became popular among the ruling class.

Romanticism in England

With the exception of William Blake, who practiced a more visionary art, the English Romantic painters favored landscape. Their depictions, however, were not as dramatic and sublime as their German counterparts, but were more naturalistic. The Norwich School was a group of landscape painters that developed from the 1803 Norwich Society of Artists. John Crome, was a founding member of the group and the first president of the Norwich Society, which held annual exhibitions from 1805-1833. Working in both watercolor and oil painting, Crome, like other members of the group emphasized en plein air painting and scientific observation of the landscape. Nonetheless, his work and the work of other artists in the group reflected a Romantic sensibility, as seen in his Boys Bathing on the River Wensum, Norwich (1817), which depicts a precisely observed scene along the Wensum River yet conveys the feeling of human harmony with the sublime beauty of the area.

John Constable was the most influential of the English landscape painters, combining close observation of nature with a deep sensitivity. Rebelling against standard practices of the academy, he wrote to his friend, "For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand .. I have not endeavored to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performances look like the work of other men .. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth." His use of color was influential on the young Eugène Delacroix, who delighted in the way Constable used dabs of local color and white to create a shimmering light. Color was most radically explored by J.M.W. Turner . Turner was a prolific, yet eccentric and reclusive, artist working in oils, watercolors, and prints. Turner's application of color in rapid strokes created an impastoed and dynamic surface that earned him the epithet "the painter of light." He would be very influential to the Impressionists in the later 19 th century and even the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko in the mid-20 th century.

Romanticism in the United States

American Romanticism found its primary expression in the landscape painting of the Hudson River School , between 1825-1875. While the movement began with Thomas Doughty, whose work emphasized a kind of quietism in nature, the most famous member of the group was Thomas Cole , whose landscapes convey a sense of awe at the vastness of nature. Other noted artists were Frederic Edwin Church , Asher B. Durand , and Albert Bierstadt . The works of most of these artists focused on the landscape of the Adirondacks, White Mountains, and Catskills of the Northeast but gradually branched out into the American West as well as South and Latin American landscapes. Working from sketches that they made outdoors, the artists would create the paintings later in their studios, sometimes using composites of various scenes to create an image of a somewhat imaginary location. The emphasis in such paintings was often upon awe-inspiring, dramatic vistas, where the human figure would appear to be dwarfed, and where an overwhelming and sublime sense of nature's beauty would be conveyed.

Romanticism in Architecture: The Age of Revivals

Romanticism in architecture rebelled against the Neoclassical ideals of the 18 th century primarily by evoking past styles. Styles from other periods and regions in the world were incorporated, all with the purpose of evoking feeling, whether a nostalgic longing for the past or for exotic mystery. Accordingly, architecture was dominated by "revival" styles, like the Gothic Revival and the Oriental Revival.

Though the incorporation of Gothic design began in the 1740s, the Gothic Revival became a dominant movement in the 1800s. In France, the historian Arcisse de Caumont's writing provided an intellectual foundation for the interest in antiquities, but it was Victor Hugo's novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) that popularized the neo-Gothic craze. In England The Houses of Parliament, also known as the Palace of Westminster, designed and rebuilt by A.W.N. Pugin with architect Charles Berry, exemplifies the Gothic Revival style.

The famous example of Oriental Revival style is the Royal Pavilion (1815-1822) in Brighton, England, built by the architect John Nash. The seaside home of King George IV includes onion domes and minarets and variations on crenellations in the building to create an imposing but exotic presence which includes elements of Asian and Middle-Eastern styles. Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign to Egypt inspired an interest in ancient Egyptian culture, leading to the use of Egyptian columns, obelisks, pylons, and sphinx sculptures. The detention complex "The Tombs," called originally the Houses of Justice, built in New York City in 1838 is a good example of the Egyptian substyle of the Oriental Revival.

Later Developments - After Romanticism

Romanticism began to fade at various times in different countries, but by the 1830s, with the introduction of photography and increasing industrialization and urbanization, artistic styles start trending more toward Realism .

The Pre-Raphaelites

The Romantics' return to earlier styles, such as Medieval art, greatly influenced the later 19 th -century British Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones , Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and John Everett Millais . These artists depicted medieval, religious, and Shakespearean subject matter filtered through a Romantically-tinged naturalism. They emphasized the imagination as well as the connections between the visual arts and literature.

Turner's and Delacroix's Influence

Turner's and Delacroix's studies and uses of color as well as their vigorous brushstrokes had a significant influence on Impressionism. Their emphasis on color rather than line as a primary mode of composition particularly influenced Georges Seurat's development of Neo-Impressionism and color theory, which became a foundation for later movements like Fauvism and Orphism .

Goya's Influence

Goya's unsentimental representations of Spanish life influenced many Realist artists of the next generation, including French avant-garde painter Édouard Manet . Some of Pablo Picasso's most noted works like Guernica (1937) reflect the continuing influence of Goya on his fellow countrymen. The gruesome results of war and abjection found a new audience who had experienced their own brutal wars in the 20 th century.

William Blake's Influence

William Blake's use of image and text to convey a single vision was influential in many modern art movements; Italian Futurism , Orphism , Russian Futurism , Dada , and Surrealism all combined text and image in a variety of ways. Blake's visionary mysticism and rebelliousness also influenced the Beat generation of the 1950's, including the writer Jack Kerouac.

Caspar David Friedrich's Influence

Caspar David Friedrich's symbolic landscapes and their evocation of the sublime had lasting influence among modern artists from the Expressionist Edvard Munch , to the Surrealists Max Ernst and René Magritte , to the later Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman . Friedrich's inspiring visualization of the German landscape was taken up by the Nazis in the 1930s to promote their ideology of Blood and Soil, which espoused racialism and a romanticized nationalism. As a result, it took many years for Friedrich's reputation to recover.

The tenets of Romanticism, emphasizing the primacy of the individual, and, within that individual, the power of the subjective imagination and feeling, became the bedrock of much of modern culture. Surrealism's emphasis on dream life and the subjective subconscious, Expressionism's emphasis on emotional intensity, and the contemporary emphasis on the artist as a cultural celebrity, all derive from Romanticism. The movement has become part of how we think about the individual, one's individual experience and its expression in art. The concept of the artist as a visionary in tune with the deeper nature of reality, which has been part of any number of avant-garde movements, is essentially a Romanticist view.

Useful Resources on Romanticism

• Delacroix: and the Rise of Modern Art Our Pick By Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle
• Théodore Géricault By Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
• Romanticism: A German Affair By Rüdiger Safranski and Robert E. Goodwin
• Romanticism and Art (World of Art) Our Pick By William Vaughn
• Caspar David Friedrich By Johannes Grave
• Page on Romanticism Our Pick By Kathryn Calley Galitz / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / October 2004
• William Blake By Glasgow University Library: Special Collection Department / November 2007
• Cry Freedom: Jonathan Jones on how Delacroix captured the ecstasy of liberty Our Pick By Jonathan Jones / The Guardian / April 1, 2005
• Caspar David Friedrich at the edge of the imaginable By Julian Bell / Times Literary Supplement / October 26, 2012
• Lord Byron - A Rock Star Poet in an Age of Extravagance By Carolyn McDowall / The Culture Concept Circle / April 21, 2012

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Four Darks in Red (1958)

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Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein

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British Romanticism

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“[I]f Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all,” proposed John Keats in an 1818 letter, at the age of 22. This could be called  romantic  in sentiment, lowercase  r , meaning fanciful, impractical, unachievably ambitious. But Keats’s axiom could also be taken as a one-sentence distillation of British Romanticism—with its all-or-nothing stance on the spontaneity of the highest art, its conviction of the sympathetic connections between nature’s organic growth and human creativity, and its passion for individual imagination as an originating force. This period is generally mapped from the first political and poetic tremors of the 1780s to the 1832 Reform Act. No major period in English-language literary history is shorter than that half-century of the Romantic era, but few other eras have ever proved as consequential. Romanticism was nothing short of a revolution in how poets understood their art, its provenance, and its powers: ever since, English-language poets have furthered that revolution or formulated reactions against it.

In Britain, Romanticism was not a single unified movement, consolidated around any one person, place, moment, or manifesto, and the various schools, styles, and stances we now label  capital-R Romantic  would resist being lumped into one clear category. Yet all of Romanticism’s products exploded out of the same set of contexts: some were a century in the making; others were overnight upheavals. Ushered in by revolutions in the United States (1776) and France (1789), the Romantic period coincides with the societal transformations of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of liberal movements and the state’s counterrevolutionary measures, and the voicing of radical ideas—Parliamentary reform, expanded suffrage, abolitionism, atheism—in pamphlets and public demonstrations. Though Britain avoided an actual revolution, political tensions sporadically broke out into traumatizing violence, as in the Peterloo massacre of 1819, in which state cavalry killed at least 10 peaceful demonstrators and wounded hundreds more.

Emboldened by the era’s revolutionary spirit, Romantic poets invented new literary forms to match. Romantic poetry can argue radical ideas explicitly and vehemently (as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England in 1819,” a sonnet in protest of Peterloo) or allegorically and ambivalently (as in William Blake’s “The Tyger,” from  Songs of Innocence and of Experience ). To quote from William Wordsworth’s preface to  Lyrical Ballads,  the groundbreaking collection he wrote with fellow poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romantic poets could “choose incidents and situations from common life” as its subjects, describing them not in polished or high-flown diction but instead in everyday speech, “a selection of language really used by men.” Romanticism can do justice to the disadvantaged, to those marginalized or forgotten by an increasingly urban and commercial culture—rural workers, children, the poor, the elderly, or the disabled—or it can testify to individuality simply by foregrounding the poet’s own subjectivity at its most idiosyncratic or experimental.

Alongside prevailing political and social ideas, Romantic poets put into practice new aesthetic theories, cobbled from British and German philosophy, which opposed the neoclassicism and rigid decorum of 18th-century poetry. To borrow the central dichotomy of critic M.H. Abrams’s influential book  The Mirror and the Lamp  (1953), Romantic poets broke from the past by no longer producing artistic works that merely mirrored or reflected nature faithfully; instead, they fashioned poems that served as lamps illuminating truths through self-expression, casting the poets’ subjective, even impressionistic, experiences onto the world. From philosophers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the Romantics inherited a distinction between two aesthetic categories, the beautiful and the sublime—in which  beautiful  suggests smallness, clarity, and painless pleasure, and  sublime  suggests boundlessness, obscurity, and imagination-stretching grandeur. From the German critic A.W. Schlegel, Coleridge developed his ideal of “organic form,” the unity found in artworks whose parts are interdependent and integral to the whole—grown, like a natural organism, according to innate processes, not externally mandated formulas.

The most self-conscious and self-critical British poets to date, the Romantics justified their poetic experimentations in a variety of prose genres (prefaces, reviews, essays, diaries, letters, works of autobiography or philosophy) or else inside the poetry itself. But they never wrote only for other poets and critics: the Romantics competed in a burgeoning literary marketplace that made room for the revival of English and Scottish ballads (narrative folk songs, transcribed and disseminated in print), the recovery of medieval romances (one etymological root of  Romantic ), and prose fiction ranging from the psychological extremes of the gothic novel to the wit of Jane Austen’s social realism. Romantic poets looked curiously backward—to Greek mythology, friezes, and urns or to a distinctly British cultural past of medieval ruins and tales of knights and elves—to look speculatively forward. Perhaps no pre-Romantic author inspired the Romantics more than William Shakespeare, who exemplified what Keats termed “ Negative Capability , that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” For Keats, “a great poet” such as Shakespeare opened his imagination to all possibilities, limited neither by an insistent search for truth nor by his own egocentric gravity: “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

Drawing on unrestrained imagination and a variegated cultural landscape, a Romantic-era poem could be trivial or fantastic, succinctly songlike or digressively meandering, a searching fragment or a precisely bounded sonnet or ode, as comic as Lord Byron’s mock epic  Don Juan  or as cosmologically subversive as Blake’s  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . If any single innovation has emerged as Romanticism’s foremost legacy, it is the dominance among poetic genres of the lyric poem, spoken in first-person (the lyric  I ) often identified with the poet, caught between passion and reason, finding correspondences in natural surroundings for the introspective workings of heart and mind. If any collection cemented that legacy, it would be Wordsworth and Coleridge’s landmark collection  Lyrical Ballads , first published anonymously in 1798. The collection provokes with its title alone, inverting hierarchies, hybridizing the exalted outbursts of lyric poetry with the folk narratives of ballads. In a retrospective preface added for the 1800 second edition and expanded in later editions, Wordsworth set out his polemical program for a poetry grounded in feeling, supplying Romanticism with some of its most resonant and lasting phrases: “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

The following poems, poets, articles, poem guides, and recordings offer introductory samples of the Romantic era. Included are the monumental Romantic poets often nicknamed “the Big Six”—the older generation of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge and the so-called Young Romantics—Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Indispensable women poets such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans; the Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns; and the farm laborer–poet John Clare are also represented. But even this collection is only a beginning: no introduction to Romanticism can encompass the entire period in all its variety and restless experimentation.

• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Lord Byron (George Gordon)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Mary Robinson
• Robert Southey
• Sir Walter Scott
• Anna Lætitia Barbauld
• Dorothy Wordsworth
• Walter Savage Landor
• Thomas Chatterton
• Charlotte Smith
• Felicia Dorothea Hemans
• Robert Burns
• Charles Lamb
• Letitia Elizabeth Landon
• Charlotte Richardson
• George Crabbe
• Hannah More
• Hartley Coleridge
• Observations Prefixed to Lyrical Ballads
• from “On Poetry in General”
• Selections from Keats’s Letters
• A Defence of Poetry
• from Biographia Literaria , Chapter XIV
• William Wordsworth 101
• John Keats: Selections
• William Blake 101
• Lightning Strikes Twice
• Keats and King Lear
• Keats in Space
• A Little Society
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Ode to the West Wind
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
• The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young
• I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
• Ode to a Nightingale
• Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
• Don Juan : Dedication
• Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
• A Red, Red Rose
• She Walks in Beauty
• from The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time
• Tam O 'Shanter
• The Book of Thel
• The Rights of Women
• from Endymion
• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
• Huge Vapours Brood above the Clifted Shore
• The Sick Rose
• So We'll Go No More a Roving
• This Lime-tree Bower my Prison
• When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be
• To a Skylark
• John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
• John Clare: “To John Clare”
• John Keats: “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Frost at Midnight”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias”
• John Keats: “To Autumn”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: “England in 1819”
• This Poet Never Gets Old
• Fact-Checking John Keats
• The Cure for Romanticism?
• I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud ("Daffodils")
• Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period
• Stanford Guide to Romantic Aesthetics
• The Romantics at the British Library
• British Women Romantic Poets at Calisphere
• Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry
• Romantic Circles Journal
• The MET’s Timeline of Art History: Romanticism
• The William Blake Archive
• Wordsworth Museum and Dove Cottage
• Keats Letters Project
• Audio Poems
• Audio Poem of the Day
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Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples

Finding beauty in nature and the common man.

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• B.A., English, Rutgers University

Romanticism was a literary movement that began in the late 18th century and ended around the middle of the 19th century—although its influence continues to this day. Marked by a focus on the individual (and the unique perspective of a person, often guided by irrational, emotional impulses), a respect for nature and the primitive, and a celebration of the common man, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period, including the revolutions that burned through countries like France and the United States, ushering in grand experiments in democracy.

Key Takeaways: Romanticism in Literature

• Romanticism is a literary movement spanning roughly 1790–1850.
• The movement was characterized by a celebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.
• Prominent Romantic writers include John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.

Romanticism Definition

The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.

Romanticism celebrated primitive and elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.

Characteristics of Romanticism

Romantic literature is marked by six primary characteristics: celebration of nature, focus on the individual and spirituality, celebration of isolation and melancholy, interest in the common man, idealization of women, and personification and pathetic fallacy.

Celebration of Nature

Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820):

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,– While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.

Focus on the Individual and Spirituality

Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to a heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements.

The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raven tells the story of a man grieving for his dead love (an idealized woman in the Romantic tradition) when a seemingly sentient Raven arrives and torments him, which can be interpreted literally or seen as a manifestation of his mental instability.

Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Reliance is a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources.

Related to the insistence on isolation, melancholy is a key feature of many works of Romanticism, usually seen as a reaction to inevitable failure—writers wished to express the pure beauty they perceived and failure to do so adequately resulted in despair like the sort expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Lament :

O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb. Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more—Oh, never more!

Interest in the Common Man

William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud :

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden Daffodils; Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Idealization of Women

In works such as Poe’s The Raven , women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms because of these attitudes. Much Romantic literature is infused with the concept of women being perfect innocent beings to be adored, mourned, and respected—but never touched or relied upon.

Personification and Pathetic Fallacy

Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein :

Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.

Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteristics of classic Romanticism despite being published a century and a half after the end of the movement’s active life.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. " Romanticism ."

Cambridge University Press. " The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism ."

Poetry Foundation. " William Wordsworth ."

University of Florida. " Romantic Myth Making: The Sympathetic Soulmate From Romanticism to Twilight and Beyond ."

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Europe 1800 - 1900

Course: europe 1800 - 1900   >   unit 2, a beginner's guide to romanticism.

19th century stylistic developments

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The nature of Romanticism

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The Romantic period

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As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics . Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel ’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.

Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake ’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley ’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats , referring to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth . Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England , was being extended to every range of human endeavor. As that ideal swept through Europe , it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.

The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.

The emphasis on feeling —seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination . Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked , and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man . A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.

Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction , however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language.

Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centered not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen , a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas ), written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge , meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance . For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion ); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy , with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge . Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature . The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood .” In poems such as “ Michael” and “ The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.

Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “ The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “ Kubla Khan ” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism , theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “ Dejection: An Ode ” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”

The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon . In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy , was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse , “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.

In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott , by contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers ), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore , whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly colored narrative Lalla Rookh : An Oriental Romance (1817) and his satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.

Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “ Lake school ” of poetry. His originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”

George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Romantic Poetry

Romantic Poetry

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 0 )

The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that can be dated as beginning with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and that is still continuing today, despite reactions and countermovements which begin almost immediately and which are highly relevant to any consideration of Victorian and modern literature. (Although romanticism includes all of William Blake’s major poetry, beginning more than a decade prior to Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s obscurity limited his influence on other major writers for a good half century.)

Paradoxically, though, these reactions can themselves be regarded as highly romantic in nature— partly, perhaps, because one very general but still useful early (1825) definition of romanticism is, in the words of the French dramatist and politician Ludovic Vitet (1802–73), “Protestantism in arts and letters” (quoted in Furst, European Romanticism ). Protestantism was a protest against the fetters of the past (even romanticism itself)—against rule and convention, as Vitet realized—and therefore was also an analogue to the Protestant Reformation. In this sense, romanticism is the analogue in the literary sphere of the freedom brought by the Enlightenment in the political, moral, and philosophical world—according to Vitet, “the right to enjoy what gives pleasure, to be moved by what moves one, to admire what seems admirable, even when by virtue of well and duly consecrated principles it could be proved that one ought not to admire, nor be moved, nor enjoy.” Wordsworth, too, spoke of his object in Lyrical Ballads as giving pleasure to his readers, rather than conforming to rules: “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction . . . because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry.” That pleasure is Protestant in its deference to the judgment and poetic conscience of the individual soul: “[T]his necessity of producing immediate pleasure . . . is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; . . . it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves” (preface to Lyrical Ballads , 1800).

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Romanticism is therefore to be defined negatively, perhaps, as a principled protest against classicism. Since the French were the earliest to identify it as a movement, we can recur to the incisive definition one of the great French romantics, Victor Hugo, who (in the preface to his 1830 play Hernani ) wrote, “Romanticism, so often badly defined, is . . . viewed wholly under its militant aspect, nothing but liberalism in literature . . . a literary liberty [which] is the daughter of political liberty.” The philosopher John Stuart Mill was one of the earliest purveyors of the term in English, but again he was describing French literature when he wrote in 1837:

The stateliness and conventional decorum of old French poetic and dramatic literature, gave place to a licence which made free scope for genius and also for absurdity, and let in new forms of the beautiful was well as many of the hideous. Literature shook off its chains, and used its liberty like a galley-slave broke loose; while painting and sculpture passed from one unnatural extreme to another, and the stiff school was succeeded by the spasmodic. This insurrection against the old traditions of classicism was called romanticism: and now, when the mass of rubbish to which it had given birth has produced another oscillation in opinion the reverse way, one inestimable result seems to have survived it—that life and human feeling may now, in France, be painted with as much liberty as they may be discussed, and, when painted truly, with approval.

Mill’s account shows the extent to which romanticism was central to Victorian literary attitudes, even as the heyday of what came to be called high romanticism came to an end in England with the beginning of the Victorian period. Indeed, the Victorian parody of the continued influence of romanticism identified what it called the “spasmodic school” of poetry.

These quotations show the extent to which romanticism is regarded as a revolutionary rejection of the past—of Mill’s classicism—which might be regarded as the literary equivalent of the French Revolution. Indeed, the first generation of English romantics were admirers of the French Revolution before its descent into destruction and terror. For this reason as well, the romantics saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a Promethean figure who promised liberty but ended up besotted with despotic power. Wordsworth, who celebrated the death of the French revolutionary Robespierre in The Prelude, nevertheless began that work with an ode to liberty. For the English romantics, that liberty was at once a break with Enlightenment rationalism and (as we have seen) a continuation of the Enlightenment’s intensely humanistic project of rejecting religious superstition and arbitrary law on behalf of the human soul’s freedom and primacy.

It is important not to make the mistake that some critics fall into of thinking of romanticism as essentially an irrational egotism. Romanticism is far more the inheritor of Enlightenment ideas than their displacer. It shares with the Enlightenment an intense focus on the powers of the human mind. For Enlightenment philosophers, that focus was often on its rational and analytic powers, whence the flowering of modern science. But such Enlightenment figures as the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau paid equal or greater attention to the mind’s subjective experience. Rousseau’s Confessions (1769) as well as his novel Julie (1761) were forerunners of intense influences on (respectively) such works as Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s T he Triumph of Life . In Immanuel Kant and the German idealists, and in Coleridge, much of whose work is uncomfortably close to plagiarism of the idealists, the relationship between its objective and subjective powers is central to a philosophical account of the mind. Kant saw that relationship forming in the faculty of judgment, of which aesthetic judgment was the most vivid example. The half-creation, half-perception of the world which takes place in judgment is the theme of romanticism, explicitly in such poems as Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Sometimes the difference between subjective and objective attitudes manifested itself as a sense of self-division within the soul, a sense that could be traced back to the philosophy of John Locke (1632– 1704), which was repugnant but therefore powerfully influential, to such figures as Blake and Wordsworth.

Self-division, solitude, subjective longing—all of these are aspects of the subjectivity which romanticism took as its starting point and theme (in part inheriting it from the more sentimental mode of 18th-century sensibility, though sensibility was far more an overtly social phenomenon than romanticism). Because of its intense interest in subjectivity as well as its rejection of superstition, it is possible to see romanticism as a kind of religious sensibility without religious belief. The soul, or self, experiences itself as fallen in a fallen world (often represented as the world of childhood or the world most closely present in childhood). In Romanticism, by rejecting the doctrines of religion—that the biblical Fall is punishment for some derogation from a state of grace—the soul also rejects the consolations of religion; accordingly, it has no hope of salvation except within itself and its own experience. That salvation is therefore primarily aesthetic and philosophical (the distinction between the two is one of emphasis, which is why so many romantic poems are so intensely philosophical). The romantics took to heart Satan’s claim in John Milton’s great 17th-century work Paradise Lost (the poem most essential to the English romantics) that “The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of hell, a Hell of heaven (1, l. 254).” Our sense of ourselves as fallen, as having a destiny and home “with infinity,” as Wordsworth says, makes the finite world a negative measure of our own subjective intensity. When this intensity is represented as a claim to greatness of soul, it can look egotistical; but what counts is the intensity of experience measured by the failure as well as by the intermittent success of the outside world at matching it.

This intermittent success tends to come with a sense of the grandeur of nature, which is why so much great romantic poetry is about nature in its most intense aspects: those of beauty, solitude, and most of all, the sublime. Nature’s wildness, partly imaged in ruined castles and abbeys, which had been a staple of gothic fiction in the 18th century were particularly appropriate settings for romantic thought. But nature is itself a projection—it is the place the mind makes of it, as in the last two lines of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” where it is the human mind’s imaginings that transfigure vacancy into silence and solitude.

The general mode of a romantic poem is one of crisis—a crisis that leads to its own solution. The very fact of crisis is a sign that the intensity of feeling and thought at risk is still there. Romantic poets worry about the loss of intensity that seems the inevitable course of human experience, but they reimagine that loss of intensity as the intensity of loss. Loss becomes, as the 20th-century literary critic Paul de Man put it somewhat skeptically, “shadowed gain.” The gain for the soul is in its apprehension of its own capacity to measure its losses, and therefore to rise above them. Loss within the soul comes to be figured as the loss of poetic vocation. The poetry inspired by this loss is a sign that poetic vocation is intensified in its own undoing, rather than dissipated— for a while at least. Romanticism reimagined poetry as an intense analysis of human subjectivity, and in doing so it lent splendor to the universal human experience of loss and decline. What more can poetry do?

Bibliography Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1973. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. ———, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Deane, Seamus. French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Furst, Lilian, ed. European Romanticism: Self-Definition: An Anthology. London: Methuen, 1980. Lovejoy, Arthur. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA (journal of the Modern Language Association) 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229–253. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Mill, John Stuart. “Armand Carrel.” In Dissertations and Discussions. Vol. 1. 237–308. Boston: Holt, 1882. Quinney, Laura. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Romanticism in England

Romanticism in France

Romanticism in America

Romantic Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth

Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge

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Romanticism Art – An Overview of the Romantic Movement

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Romantic movement began to emerge throughout Europe. The Romantic movement, which emphasized emotion and imagination, emerged in response to artistic disillusion with the Enlightenment ideas of order and reason. Romanticism encompassed art of all forms, from literary works to architectural masterpieces. Emphasizing the subjective, the individual, the spontaneous, irrational, visionary, imaginative, and transcendental, Romanticism rejected the style and notions of Neoclassicism .

Table of Contents

• 1.1.1 Nationalism
• 1.1.2 Subjectivity
• 1.1.3 Painting en Plein Air
• 1.1.4 Justice and Equality
• 2 The Development of Romanticism Art
• 3.1 Pre-Romantic Literature: The Development of the Troubled Hero
• 3.2 Romanticism Characteristics in Literature
• 4.1 The Sublime: Stimulating the Romantic Mind
• 4.2 Romantic Landscapes: Romanticism Paintings and the Natural World
• 4.3.1 Mazeppa and the Wolves (1826): Horace Vernet
• 4.4.1 The Voyage of Life (1840): Thomas Cole
• 4.5.1 Alfred Dedreux (1810-1860): Théodore Géricault
• 4.6.1 The Women of Algiers (1834): Eugène Delacroix
• 5.1 Romantic Opera
• 5.2 Developments in Musical Instruments
• 6 Romantic Architecture: The Gothic Revival
• 7.1 French Romanticism
• 7.2 English Romanticism
• 7.3 American Romanticism

A Brief Summary of the Romantic Movement

What is Romanticism? The spread of Romanticism throughout Europe and even the United States was rapid towards the late 18th century. Romanticism challenged the rational ideals so loved by artists of the Enlightenment. Romantic artists believed that emotions and senses were equally as important as order and reason for experiencing and understanding the world.

Following the French Revolution , the enduring search for individual liberty and rights fueled the Romantic celebration of intuition and imagination. The Romantic ideas of the subjectively creative powers of the artist continued to fuel Avant-Garde movements into the 20th century.

Romantic artists reacting against the somber Neoclassical style found their expression through music, literature, architecture, and visual art. The Romantic movement encompasses a variety of styles because it valued imagination, inspiration, and originality. Personal connections to nature and an idealized past were a significant theme for many Romantic artists attempting to hold back the waves of industrialism.

Key Romanticism Art Characteristics: A Romanticism Definition

You will already see that the Romantic movement was broad and far-reaching. Despite the variety of individual expressions encouraged by Romanticism, there are several key Romanticism characteristics, which underlie Romantic art. These include growing nationalism, subjectivity, plein air painting , and concerns with justice and equality.

Nationalism

The growing nationalism throughout Europe following the American Revolution was closely tied to Romanticism. You can see this nationalism in the emphasis on landscapes, traditions, and folklore in Romantic literature and art. Through the visual imagery in these works, Romantic artists fed a sense of national pride and identity. Many Romantic paintings are steeped in a call to spiritual renewal, which would continue ushering in a new age of liberties and freedom.

Subjectivity

One of the most significant elements of Romanticism was the increased emphasis on the personal and subjective power of the individual artist. The Neoclassical period, which preceded Romanticism, valued strict rule-based practices and logical thought in art. We can consider Romanticism as a direct reactionary response to the Neoclassical period.

Romantic artists began to explore different psychological, emotional, and mood states in their works. The Neoclassical obsession with genius and hero transformed into new ideas about the artist. Artists were able to express themselves fully, free from the tastes and rules of academic institutions.

Painting en Plein Air

Throughout Europe, Romantic artists began turning their attention to the natural world. With this growing fascination with nature, there was an increase in the practice of painting en Plein air, or outside. Artists would paint natural scenes by observing them directly. This process enabled artists to produce elevated landscapes. The close and intimate observation of the natural world translated into more emotive and atmospheric scenes.

Some Romantic artists painted scenes that emphasized humans as being one with nature. Other artists preferred to portray the powerful and unpredictable forces of nature in paintings that evoke feelings of awe and sometimes terror. Romantic artists harbored a deep appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.

Justice and Equality

Partly driven forwards by French Revolutionary idealism, the Romantic period embraced the fight for equality, freedom, and the advancement of justice. Many Romantic painters began painting scenes of current atrocities and social events. Dramatic compositions illuminated instances of injustice and rivaled the more rigid history paintings of the Neoclassical period.

The Development of Romanticism Art

At the end of the 18th century, German critics Friedrich and August Schlegal first used the term Romanticism in their article on “Romantic Poetry.” The term became popular in France in the early 19th century thanks to Madame de Stael, an influential intellectual French leader. She used the term in a published account of her travels in Germany in 1813.

In England, the poet William Wordsworth was a significant proponent of Romanticism. Wordsworth believed that poetry was a natural expression of powerful emotions. Romantic artists shared an attitude towards humanity, nature, and art, but each was distinct in its unique expressions. The rejection of established orders, including religious and social systems, became a dominant theme of the Romantic movement. By 1820, Romanticism had firmly established itself throughout Europe.

Romanticism Literature

The earliest expressions of Romanticism were literary. The German movement Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, was a precursor to Romanticism. This movement was primarily musical and literary and was popular between 1760 and 1780. Storm and Stress had a far-reaching influence on artistic and public consciousness. Romanticism was inspired by the title of a Friedrich Maximillian Klinger play called Romanticism (1777).

Pre-Romantic Literature: The Development of the Troubled Hero

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German statesman, and writer was the most famous advocate for the growing Romantic movement. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a story about an emotionally anguished young artist who commits suicide when the woman he loves marries another, became a cultural phenomenon. Young men began adopting the clothing and mannerisms of the protagonist, and copycat suicides even occurred. As a result, some countries, including Italy and Denmark, banned the novel.

Although Goethe would later renounce his novel, the idea of an emotionally anguished young artist, a misunderstood genius, wormed its way into public consciousness. Many believe that the protagonist of this novel inspired the hero in Romanticism literature.

The preoccupation with the misunderstood emotional hero was strengthened further by the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) by Lord Gordon Byron, the British Poet. This publication introduced the term “Byronic hero,” the brooding and lone genius figure, torn between their worst and best traits.

Romanticism Characteristics in Literature

It was through literature that many Romantic tropes were first developed, but what is Romanticism in literature? In England, France, and Germany, in particular, Romantic authors fueled the growing interest in subjectivity, the misunderstood genius, and nationalism. Here is a brief list of some of the most famous writers and poets from early Romanticism.

We begin to see the emergence of Romanticism in literature in the 1790s with Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth. The preface of this publication included the description of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which became somewhat of a Romanticism manifesto. This statement represented the Romanticism definition for early writers.

The poet William Blake was another founding poet of the first English Romantic phase. The first German Romantic phase included many innovations in literary style and content. A preoccupation with the subconscious, mystical, and supernatural also marked Romanticism. Writers including Jean Paul, August Wilhelm, Ludwig Tieck, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Heinrich, and Friedrich Schelling, were prominent during this first Romantic period in Germany.

The second Romantic period ran from 1805 until the 1830s. During this time, there was a very rapid increase in cultural nationalism, and artists and writers turned their attentions to national origins. Native folklore, folk music, folk dances, folk poetry, and ballads were collected and imitated extensively. Sir Walter Scott translated this revived historical appreciation into his imaginative writings. As a result, we often attribute the invention of the historical novel to him.

English Romantic poetry also reached its peak during this period, with the popular works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. Fascination with the supernatural was a fundamental characteristic of Romantic literature and tied into the interest with the subjective emotional world. Works like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and other works by Marquis de Sade, Charles Robert Maturin, and E. T. A. Hoffmann explore this fascination.

The 1820s saw a significant broadening in the scope of Romantic literature, including that of most of Europe. Towards the end of this second phase, Romanticism was becoming increasingly nationalistic rather than universal. Authors began concentrating on their national and cultural histories, examining and exalting the struggles and passions of important historical figures.

The most prominent figures in Romantic literature are undoubtedly the English, French, and German authors we have already mentioned. There were, however, other significant authors from many European countries. In Italy, Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni were particularly influential. Angel de Saavedra and Jose de Espronceda dominated Spanish Romantic literature, while in Russia, Mikhail Lermontov and Aleksandr Pushkin were prominent figures.

Romanticism in the Visual Arts

The same fascination with emotional intensity, the supernatural, nationalism, and the hero trope in Romantic literature carry over into Romantic art. The visual art of the Romantic period also explored the natural world through landscapes and ideas of revolution and justice. Orientalism was also rife in a lot of Romantic painting, and it is possible to see the effects of Romanticism in the portraiture of the day.

The Sublime: Stimulating the Romantic Mind

The Romantic era saw something of a great awakening to the philosophy of the mind. Philosophers, novelists, and visual artists alike began to explore the relationship between experience and the intricacies of the human mind. The sublime entered into Romanticism following the 1756 publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Part of the significance of these philosophical inquiries lay in their direct contradiction of Enlightenment rationality. The sublime was an experience whereby one views an object so beautiful and astonishing that we are unable to hold anything else in mind. Experiencing the sublime is more than the experience of beauty. Instead, it is to experience something so awe-inspiring that it overtakes our sense of objective reality. Experiencing the sublime is crucial to Romanticism painting because it triggers the necessary self-examination.

Romantic Landscapes: Romanticism Paintings and the Natural World

Many leading Romantic artists in England, the United States, and Germany focused their sights primarily on landscapes. Many Romantic artists attempted to capture the sublime in their landscapes. The natural world was one of the primary ways in which people could experience the sublime.

The overwhelming power and beauty of the natural world, be it the rolling thunderclouds of an approaching storm or an expansive landscape, can make the human mind consider its place in the world. Attempting to understand or perceive the formlessness, ungovernability, and boundlessness of the natural world leads to overwhelming emotions.

Shipwreck imagery was a common theme in many French and British Romantic landscapes. A shipwreck is a powerful representation of the overwhelming force of nature and human attempts to combat it. The uncontrollable power of the natural world offers a direct alternative to the structured and controlled world of Enlightenment philosophy.

According to Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, anything that “stuns the soul” and leaves us with a “feeling of terror” is a direct path to the sublime. Many art historians believe that shipwreck imagery culminated with the Raft of the Medusa (1819) by Théodore Géricault. This powerful scene is incredibly explicit, creating an overwhelming influx of intense emotionality. The conspicuous lack of a hero within the scene made this painting an iconic representation of Romanticism.

English Romantic painters were some of the most prominent landscape artists within the movement. Artists like John Constable and J. M. W. Wiliam Turner encapsulate the Romantic fascination with the natural world, and they are able to capture the power and unpredictability of its beauty.

The dramatic and transient effects of color, light, and atmosphere in these works capture the dynamism of the natural world and evoke a sense of grandeur and awe. Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) by J. M. W. Turner is a famous composition that dwarfs the human experience in the face of nature’s power. Three or four figures are engulfed within a large, swirling storm of snow, utterly dwarfed by the forces beyond their control.

The landscapes of John Constable highlight another key Romantic attitude towards nature. John Constable’s landscapes express his individual relationship to his native English countryside. Other artists and critics embraced Constable’s works as “nature itself” in an 1824 exhibition at the Parisian Salon. The high level of subjectivity and attention to the landscapes highlight the ingrained sense of individuality in Romanticism.

The Animal Kingdom

While Romantic landscapes rarely included human forms, they often featured various members of the animal kingdom. In fact, many Romantic painters represented animals as metaphors for human behavior and forces of nature.

The 1820s saw artists like Edwin Landseer and Delacroix Antoine-Louis Barye creating sketches of wild animals in the London and Parisian menageries. Gericault was another Romantic artist fascinated with members of the animal kingdom, and he had a particularly soft spot for horses. From racehorses to workhorses, Gericault depicted horses extensively in his work. For artists like Théodore Chassériau and Delacroix, Lord Byron’s story of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse inspired depictions of passion and violence.

Mazeppa and the Wolves (1826): Horace Vernet

In the 1827 Salon, Horace Vernet showed two scenes directly from Mazeppa. This particular composition depicts part of the legend of Mazeppa. In this scene, after being found to be having an affair with a countess, her husband ties Mazeppa naked to the back of a horse. The horse carries him down to the very bottom of the steppes in Ukraine. According to the legend, and depicted in the painting, the hero was attacked by a pack of wolves on his journey.

The Hudson River School

In America, Romantic landscapes cannot be separated from the Hudson River School. American Romantic painters found inspiration in the wild and rugged American terrain and the Transcendentalism philosophy. The landscapes by American Romantic period artists tend to be highly detailed, vivid, and often idealized natural scenes.

Painters who used this style were members of the Hudson River School. The group was founded by the famous landscape painters, Thomas Cole . The second group of Hudson River landscape painters came from New York. These artists ventured out into the wild landscapes of the West. All Hudson River Romantic painters shared the desire to capture the majesty and sublimity of the natural world.

The Voyage of Life (1840): Thomas Cole

In 1840, Cole painted a four-part series of landscapes. These landscapes, with a Romantic backdrop, serve as a Christian allegory for the four stages of a man’s life.

The first painting is Childhood , and it sets the stage for the entire series. The composition shows a baby exiting a dark canal on a small boat bathed in light. The water below is smooth and calm, and a soft white light bathes the landscape around the child. At the tiller of the boat is a guardian angel, gently guiding the child out onto the water.

The second painting is called Youth. The composition remains the same as the first painting, and the surroundings continue to be lush and peaceful. The stark difference between the first and second painting is the guardian angel leaving the boy on his own. The young boy eagerly grabs the tiller and sets off towards his ambitions and dreams. A youthful innocence still permeates this painting, but just beyond the river’s bend, the water begins to get choppy. Hints of a more troublesome and difficult journey towards his dreams lay ahead.

Manhood is the third painting in this series. A grown man replaces the young boy on the boat. The peaceful and luscious countryside on either side of the riverbank is gone, and the skies have grown dark. The waters are choppy, and large jagged rocks line the edge of the water. The boat is missing its tiller, and the man is no longer in control.

From a distance, he is still watched by his guardian angel where the man cannot see her. He must continue to have faith that she is watching over him. According to historians, Cole wanted to communicate how the idealism and dreams we have when we are young come crashing down in adulthood. The ocean that begins to appear in the distance, symbolizes the end of the man’s life, and the warm red hues of the sunset hint at hope despite his trials.

The final painting in this series is called Old Age. The angel returns to the side of the now old man. His boat now sits on the expansive ocean, and the waters are smooth and calm once again. Light is beginning to break through the dark clouds in the sky, and the man’s faith has carried him safely through the trials of his life. The beauty of eternity now awaits him.

Romantic Portraiture

The Romantic interest in internal, subjective states is possibly best captured in their portraiture. While traditional, Neoclassical portraiture aimed to capture the likeness of an individual, Romantic portraiture was far more interested in the psychological and emotional states of the individual.

Gericault explored emotional anguish in the extremes of mental health through portraits he painted of psychiatric patients. The emotionality that Gericault is able to capture represents the epitome of the Romantic interest in the wild and subjective. Gericault also explored the darker sides of childhood.

Alfred Dedreux (1810-1860): Théodore Géricault

This portrait is one of the best examples of Gericault’s portraiture of young children. The portrait is of a young boy called Alfred Dedreux, the nephew of Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy, a good friend of Gericault. Although the young boy is only about five or six years old, he appears to be an adult. His face carries a seriousness of a grown man, and the dark background with heavy and ominous clouds communicates feelings of unease.

History Painting

While Romanticism paintings rejected almost everything from the Neoclassic era, Romantic period artists repurposed the History painting. Romantic artists discarded the pedantic rules and regulations of Neoclassical history painting in favor of more exotic subjects.

While the Romanticism we have spoken about so far has been primarily concerned with depicting scenes of high emotionality, lack of human control, and the sublime, oriental, and glorified images were also an essential part of the movement’s oeuvre. Many of the paintings we discuss here would not be appropriate today, following Edward Said’s study of Orientalism. It is possible to find Orientalism in both Romantic painting and literature.

Eugene Delacroix, the most famous French Romantic painter, visited Morocco in 1832, and this trip prompted many other Romantic artists to follow suit. Delacroix is famous for his expressive and free brushwork, dynamic compositions, adventurous and exotic subject matter, and sensual use of color.

Following the example of Delacroix, Chasseriau visited Algeria in 1846, and we can follow his journey through his notebooks full of drawings and watercolors. These preliminary studies would later inspire many paintings produced in Paris.

The exaggerated exoticism of the Eastern World by European artists began in the Renaissance period . You can see this early development in The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511). In Oriental paintings like this one, the artist attempts to create a scene that captures and glorifies the exotic nature of these Middle Eastern countries. These scenes, however, tend to cross the line between glorification and caricatures. Many of these paintings are deeply offensive to the cultures they portray.

The fascination with Middle Eastern subjects grew in popularity during the Romantic era, with paintings of nude women like Grande Odalisque (1814) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and The Women of Algiers (1834) by Delacroix. These paintings project the fears and desires of the artists onto the Middle Eastern and African scenes.

The Women of Algiers (1834): Eugène Delacroix

When this painting was first shown in Paris in 1834, it caused a great stir. Not only were the highly sexual connotations shocking to Parisian society, but the painting also portrayed the use of opium. At the time, opium was only portrayed in works featuring prostitutes.

This painting was also notorious because of the way Delacroix was able to paint Muslim women, whose coverings made them tricky to paint. Delacroix’s secret was that he was able to sketch some of these women during his 1832 visit to Morocco. Despite the sensation, King Louis Philippe purchased the painting and presented it to the Luxembourg museum. It now hangs in the Louvre, alongside many of his other masterpieces.

Music and Romanticism

As in literature and the visual arts, Romantic music emphasizes individuality, subjectivity, emotional expression, and freedom of expression. Two composers, in particular, bridged the gap between the Romantic and Classical periods . These two musical artists are Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven. For some time, the musical techniques used by these two were strict and formal, and very classical. It was, however, their use of programmatic elements and communication of intense emotionality that set the stage for music in the Romantic era.

Romanticism influenced the musical world in several ways. Romantic composers took the opera to new heights, and there were many innovations in musical instruments that allowed musicians and composers to create new possibilities of dramatic expression.

Romantic Opera

Romantic opera began in Germany and Italy consecutively. In Germany, the works of Carl Maria von Weber sparked Romantic opera and culminated with the works of Richard Wagner. Wagner combined various diverse elements of Romanticism into his operatic works. From the cult of the hero to the fervent nationalism, expressive music, exotic costumes and sets, and the virtuosity in vocal and orchestral settings.

In Italy, Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti were the leading composers of Romantic opera. While these composers developed the Italian Romantic opera, it was through Guiseppe Verdi that it reached its pinnacle.

Developments in Musical Instruments

Without innovations in the instrument repertoire, Romantic composers could not bring their dreams to fruition. The perfection and expansion of the instrumental repertoire allowed composers to reach new levels of dramatic expression. Composers were able to express their unique subjectivity and intense emotionality through music in very new ways, thanks to the creation of new musical forms. These forms include the nocturne, capriccio, mazurka, prelude, intermezzo, and lied.

Romantic composers often found inspiration in national folk tales, poetry, and legends. Many strung together music and words through forms like incidental music, the concert overture, and programmatically. These are unique features that distinguish Romantic music.

The first phase of Romanticism was dominated by many famous composers, including Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Frederic Chopin. Each of these composers expanded the vocabulary of harmony to the very limits, exploiting the full range of the chromatic scale. They also pushed orchestral instruments to the boundaries of their expressive abilities and explored the linking of the human voice and instrumentation.

During the middle Romanticism phase, composers like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, and Antonin Dvorak dominated the music scene. These composers created complex, unique, and highly emotive pieces. The nationalism within Romanticism began to permeate music during this phase.

Composers like Bedrich Smetana and Dvorak integrated national folk melodies with highly expressive musicality, creating fantastic and powerful works. Composers like Jean Sibelius, Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler tied up the final phase of Romantic music.

Romantic Architecture: The Gothic Revival

Just as in art, literature, and music, Romantic architecture rejected the ideals of Neoclassical design. The primary way that Romantic architecture undermined the Neoclassical style was by referring to historical styles. Romantic architects used styles from various countries and eras to evoke feelings of exoticism and nostalgia. A revival style, like that of the Oriental Revival and Gothic Revival, dominated Romantic architecture.

As early as the 1740s, architects began incorporating Gothic design elements. It was, however, only in the 1800s that the Gothic Revival grew in popularity. The Victor Hugo novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and instigated the popularity of Neo-Gothic architecture . Perhaps the clearest British example of the Gothic Revival is the Houses of Parliament. These buildings were designed and rebuilt by the architect Charles Berry and A. W. N. Pugin.

Romanticism Throughout the World

Romanticism began in Germany but before long it was popular throughout America and many European countries. Each country had its own unique expression of Romanticism, informed by the national culture and history.

French Romanticism

Romantic painters began challenging the Neoclassical techniques of Jacques-Louis David following the Napoleonic Wars and the exile of Napoleon. Unlike German Romantic artists, the French had a much wider repertoire of subjects, including history painting and portraiture. Artists like Eugéne Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérome ushered in an age of Orientalism with their colorful and dramatically staged compositions of different parts of North Africa.

French Romantic artists also experimented with sculpture. Géricault, in particular, experimented with sculptures, including an 1818 piece called Nymph and Satyr, which presented a violent and suggestive meeting between two mythological creatures. Animals were the most prominent subjects for French Romantic sculptures.

Artists were able to capture the violence and aggression of savage beasts with such delicate beauty. These works are some of the best examples of art attempting to reach the sublime by creating scenes of terror and awe. Antoine-Louis Bayre is the most famous French animal sculptor.

English Romanticism

In England, Romanticism was seen most prominently in literature and landscape paintings . Unlike the dramatic landscapes favored by German painters, English landscape artists were much more naturalistic. From 1803, the Norwich School group of landscape artists was founded. John Crome was a prominent founding member. This group held annual exhibitions between 1805 and 1833. Many members of the group, including Crome, practiced painting en plein air.

When discussing English Romantic landscapes, we cannot ignore the influence of John Constable. As one of the foremost Romantic landscape painters, Constable infused a deep sensitivity into his close observation of nature. Eugene Delacroix was heavily influenced by the way Constable used dabs of white and local color to imitate glimmers of light.

When it comes to color use, J. M. W. Turner was the most radical Romantic artist. Turner was reclusive and eccentric and worked in prints, watercolor, and oil. Using rapid strokes of color, Turner was able to create dynamic compositions with stunning light effects.

American Romanticism

The center of Romantcicism in America was the Hudson River School. Between 1825 and 1875, American Romantic painters found their primary expression through landscape painting. Cole is certainly the most well-known member of the group, but it began with Thomas Doughty. The work of Doughty emphasized a quiet stillness in nature.

Frederic Edwin Church was also an influential member of this group of landscape artists, alongside Asher B. Durand and Albert Bierstadt. Most of these artists focused on painting the Catskills, White Mountains, and Adirondacks of the American Northeast.

Gradually, American Romantic artists began moving towards Southern and Western America and the landscapes in Latin America. Like many English landscape artists, American Romantic painters used sketches completed outdoors to create paintings within their studios. American Romantic landscapes are often highly dramatic, overwhelming, and awe-inspiring vistas.

Romanticism was a natural reaction against the strict, dogmatic rules of the Neoclassical period. In the face of Enlightenment ideals that valued rational thought and logic, Romantic artists emphasized emotionality, uncontrollable nature, and the subjectivity of each individual. These Romantic characteristics permeated all forms of art in the 18th century, from literature to music, visual arts, and architecture.

Take a look at our Romantic art webstory here!

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Romanticism Art – An Overview of the Romantic Movement.” Art in Context. April 28, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/romanticism-art/

Meyer, I. (2021, 28 April). Romanticism Art – An Overview of the Romantic Movement. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/romanticism-art/

Meyer, Isabella. “Romanticism Art – An Overview of the Romantic Movement.” Art in Context , April 28, 2021. https://artincontext.org/romanticism-art/ .

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ENGL405: The American Renaissance

The romantic period, 1820–1860: essayists and poets.

This article offers even more information about the romantic period in US literature. Many use the labels "American Romanticism" and "American Renaissance" interchangeably; as you dig into this course, ask yourself whether you see a potential distinction between these two terms and what each of them defines.

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of "the American Renaissance". 

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay "The Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of "self" – which suggested selfishness to earlier generations – was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: "selfrealization", "self-expression", "self-reliance".

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The "sublime" – an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) – produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates – were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.

Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world – a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston's lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem commemorating the battle, "Concord Hymn", has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord was the first rural artist's colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial , which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance ) and Fruitlands.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero – like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain's Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym – typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice – all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) that American writers rose to the challenge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church". The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting "as if God were dead" and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.

Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay "Self-Reliance", Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas – the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation – are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past...? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut". He complained that Alcott's abstract style omitted "the light that shines on a man's hat, in a child's spoon".

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with "going to heaven in a swing". Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem "Brahma" relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:

If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: "Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma".

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the 19th century had been Wordsworth's poems and Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden , or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden , Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called "Economy", he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.

In Walden , Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of selfdiscovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: "I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind".

Thoreau's method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.

In Walden , Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.

Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", while Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience", with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself", the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.

A visionary book celebrating all creation, Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by Emerson's writings, especially his essay "The Poet", which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet's self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through "Song of Myself" like restless music:

My ties and ballasts leave me... I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision.

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman's birds are not the conventional "winged spirits" of poetry. His "yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs". Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, "Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any". But he is equally the suffering individual, "The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on....I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs....I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken.."..

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem". When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the "open road".

Whitman's greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism's "Gilded Age". In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its "mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry" that mask an underlying "dry and flat Sahara" of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population ("Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does"). Yet ultimately, Whitman's main claim to immortality lies in "Song of Myself". Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me As good belongs to you.

Whitman's voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of "experimental", or organic, form.

The Brahmin Poets

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning.

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the 19th century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly .

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Wellmeaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the "jingle man"). They were pillars of what was called the "genteel tradition" that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost 100 years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in European meters "Evangeline" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858).

Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel book entitled Outre-Mer , retelling foreign legends and patterned after Washington Irving's Sketch Book . Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1854), "My Lost Youth" (1855), and "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880) continue to give pleasure.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)

James Russell Lowell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor of the North American Review , Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his comment: "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge".

Under his wife's influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of women's suffrage and laws ending child labor. His Biglow Papers, First Series (1847-48) creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial "character" tradition with the new realism and regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark Twain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table , 1858), novels ( Elsie Venner , 1861), biographies ( Ralph Waldo Emerson , 1885), and verse that could be sprightly ("The Deacon's Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), philosophical ("The Chambered Nautilus"), or fervently patriotic ("Old Ironsides").

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In his time, and more so thereafter, he symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything from society and language to medicine and human nature.

Two Reformers

New England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers increasingly value the work of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt Whitman's. He was born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal education, and worked as a journalist. For decades before it became popular, he was an ardent abolitionist. Whittier is respected for anti-slavery poems such as "Ichabod", and his poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism.

Whittier's sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. His best work, the long poem "Snow Bound", vividly recreates the poet's deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England's blustering snowstorms. This simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century . It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial , which she edited from 1840 to 1842.

Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of women's role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of "self-dependence", which women lack because "they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within".

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all:

...Let us be wise and not impede the soul....Let us have one creative energy....Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the 19th century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.

Dickinson's terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman's. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects – a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson's standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.

A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense – To a discerning Eye – Much Sense – the starkest Madness – 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail – Assent – and you are sane – Demur – you're straightway dangerous And handled with a chain –

Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there's a pair of us? Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one's name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson's 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson's poetry sometimes feels as if "a cat came at us speaking English". Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

121 Romanticism Essay Topics & Examples

In a romanticism essay, you can explore a variety of topics, from American literature to British paintings. For that task, these ideas of romanticism collected by our team will be helpful!

🏆 Best Romanticism Ideas & Essay Examples

• ⭐ Simple & Easy Romanticism Essay Titles

📌 Most Interesting Romanticism Essay Topics

👍 good research ideas on romanticism, ❓ essay questions on romanticism.

• Wordsworth’s Romanticism in Tintern Abbey Poem The tone of the poem is calm and meditative and Wordsworth describes the “landscape” and compares it to the “quiet” of the sky: “The landscape with the quiet of the sky”..
• Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism in Literature Romantic literature is characterized by several key traits, such as a love of nature, an emphasis on the individual and spirituality, a celebration of solitude and sadness, an interest in the common man, an idealization […]
• Between Romanticism and Modernism The first of the modernists in music sought to begin new dimensions and depths in music through the use of non-conventional instruments and novel sounds.
• Romanticism and Victorian Literature Comparison In this respect, literature can be proud of the Romanticism and Victorian literature, because of their gradual framework and applicable emergence due to the significant events, such as the French Revolution, American Revolution, the defeat […]
• Romanticism in Wolfgang Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther It is the fruitless reconciliation of the impulsive and sensitive to the society that makes Young Werther’s journey so powerful. What is even more interesting is that this general tone is what led to the […]
• The French Revolution: Romanticism Period Romanticism was anchored in the work of the poets which was evident in the daily lives of the society. Besides, the role of women in romantic literature was significant, thus; they were greatest poets and […]
• Restoration Literature and Romanticism: Common Facts All in all, the period of Restoration in the English literature can be described as the vindication of mind, intellectual values and political interests. The diction of this period is soft, inspiring, light and moving.
• Ethnocentrism, Romanticism, Exoticism, and Primitivism as Depicted in James Cameron’s “Avatar” Ethnocentrism is depicted in most scenes of Avatar; the film outlines Na’vi’s ways of life and the way the protagonist is forced to profess the culture before being admitted into the community.
• Romanticism, Baroque and Renaissance Paintings’ Analysis It is possible to focus on such artworks as the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar Friedrich, The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, and Raphael’s The School of Athens.
• Romanticism and the Modern Theatre The statement by the Romantic writer confirms the need to involve ordinary people in the theatre. The relationship between Faust and the devil in Goethe’s play is different from that in the traditional myth.
• Light vs. Dark Romanticism As the narration continues and Katrina is wooed by Crane, Irving interrupts and expresses his imagination about the challenging and admirable nature of women.
• The History of the Romanticism Period Romanticism refers to the period of intellectual, artistic and literary movement in Europe in the first half of nineteenth century. The supporters of the Romantic Movement point to the spontaneous and irrational display of powerful […]
• Nature in 18th Century and Romanticism Literatures The anxiety inherent in a sketch – the feeling of being unsettled – leads Goldsmith to other stylistic choices, most notably the creation of illusions and the reliance upon sentiment, both of which smooth away […]
• Feminism Builds up in Romanticism, Realism, Modernism Exploring the significance of the theme as well as the motifs of this piece, it becomes essential to understand that the era of modernism injected individualism in the literary works.
• Nature as the Mean of Expression in Romanticism The period of Romanticism is characterized by its address to nature, in other words, the world was perceived through the nature.”It is characterized by a shift from the structured, intellectual, reasoned approach of the 1700’s […]
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poetry: British Romanticism There can be no doubt as to the fact that Romantic writers and poets strongly opposed the ideals of the French Revolution; however, this was not due to these ideals’ rational essence, but because, during […]
• Romanticism in Seascape Painting by Jules Dupre In particular, it is important to examine the stylistic peculiarities of this artwork and the way in which it reflects the cultural trends that emerged in the nineteenth century.
• Nineteenth Century Romanticism The works of early composers, writers, painters, and poets evolved from the onset, and in the increased quest for perfection, a spirit of romanticism was born.
• Gothic Romanticism in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “The Birthmark” In the film “The Black Swan” directed by Darren Aronofsky, Nina struggles to fit into the ultimate role of the play “The Swan Lake”, as the Black Swan, even though she is comfortable playing the […]
• Romanticism of Blake’s and Ghalib’s Poems In this journal, I will look at how Blake and Ghalib exemplify the Romantic movement, how their works differ from those of the Enlightenment, and the significance of their democratic and accessible writing style.
• Romanticism: Beethoven’s Pathétique and Douglass’ The Narrative Two such examples of Romanticism works are Beethoven’s piano sonata, Pathetique, and Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
• Researching of Musical Romanticism The critical characteristics of musical Romanticism could be seen in the stress on uniqueness and individuality, the expression of one’s emotions, and freedom of form and experimentation.
• Renaissance and Romanticism: Concepts of Beauty Titian, as a representative of the Renaissance, depicted a portrait of a girl in compliance with all the canons of his time.

⭐ Simple & Easy Romanticism Essay Titles

• Romanticism as an Ideological and Artistic Trend Romanticism in painting rejected the rationalism of classicism and reflected the attention to the depths of the human personality characteristic of the philosophy of the Romantics.
• Romanticism in Modern Ecological Literature The current efforts by humans to safeguard the environment, coupled with the onset of ecological literature, not only indicates that romanticism never disappeared but also proves that the romantics were right. The artists were critical […]
• Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, and Rococo Thus, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the neoclassical style was widely popular in Europe. This style contradicted the coldness and simplicity of neoclassicism.
• Features of French Romanticism in Camille Saint-Saens’s Music It is important to analyze Camille Saint-Saens’s works in the context of French Romanticism because the composer often combined the elements of French Romanticism with features typical of other movements and music styles like habanera.
• Romanticism. Artists Associated With the Movement Art dealt mostly with issues of motive and realism while other forms of art dealt with the darkness of the community on one hand and its magnificence on the other.
• Gothic Romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe When the thought of today, the nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as the master of the short story and the psychological thriller.
• Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America The analysis of romanticism presentation on the basis of Rousseau’s theory is to be reflected through the atmosphere of French revolution period. Romanticism of Rousseau appeared to be close to the approach of ‘primitivism’, characterizing […]
• Romanticism: Paintings by Francisco Goya The first painting depicted a nude woman in the Western art and the second painting was painted after controversial thoughts from the Spanish society over the meaning of The Nude Maja.
• Tristan and Isolde Opera Romanticism The Tristan and Isolde drama is influenced by a wide range of things. Wagner uses the voices to show what is in the thoughts of Isolde and her attendant.
• British Romanticism and Its Origins It was partially a rebellion against aristocratic social and political standards of the Age of Enlightenment and a response against the scientific explanation of nature and was exemplified most powerfully in the visual arts, music, […]
• Romanticizing Literature, Visual Arts and Music During Romanticism 1800-1850 As “it emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental”, the Romanticism period inspired many artists in the field of literature, painting, music, […]
• Enlightenment and Romanticism: Comparison In the wake up of the feminist and historicist takes to pieces of the older Romanticism, particularly Bloom’s “creative thinker corporation” and the Wordsworth-centered verse of consciousness and the natural world, one has to inquire […]
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Legacy of the Romantics

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Nowadays the word ‘romantic’ tends to trigger associations with love and sentimentality, but the period known as the Romantic era encompassed so much more! Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define and has been interpreted in various ways in different countries. However, it is true to say that it flowered originally against a backdrop of violent revolution during a period of economic, political and social transition. It was a European phenomenon, and had an impact upon many spheres of thought and activity. Advocating freedom and independence, many artists and philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries challenged the way people looked at the world, emphasizing the integrity of the individual and refusing to bow to convention.

Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley were pre-eminent among the Romantic poets. Regarding themselves as intuitive prophets, they rejected the pure rationalism and order of the Enlightenment, maintaining that nature and the healing power of the imagination could enable people to transcend their everyday circumstances. Creative powers could be used to illuminate and transform the world into a coherent vision, to regenerate mankind spiritually. Given the centrality of the poetic imagination, poets could therefore claim to be interpreters of reality. Shelley asserted that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

The Romantics found fresh ways to express themselves: their reverence for nature, in its awesome majesty, was to prove a lasting legacy. Drawing upon the environment for inspiration, they encouraged people to travel, both literally and metaphorically, into new territories. Their attitudes to life were liberating and made the world seem a place of infinite potential. The ramifications of their approach have continued to have an impact on culture subsequently.

Certain literary character types stem from the Romantic period: for example, the dark, brooding, rebellious Byronic hero and the mysterious femme fatale such as Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Romantics often embraced the macabre, hence the popularity of Gothic novels. There was also keen interest in scientific discoveries and developments. In particular, Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ has endured and it has been argued that this pioneering text paved the way for science-fiction.

Literature was not the only art form to be affected by Romanticism. Composers also veered away from the formal clarity of classicism to experiment, striving for deeper emotional depth. Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt were early pioneers. They were followed by Verdi, Wagner, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, all of whom produced innovative music, and in the twentieth century Schoenberg, Debussy, Bartok, Mahler, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Puccini and Rachmaninoff continued the Romantic tradition. Virtuoso conductors and performers attracted attention. There are a number of modern composers who are referred to as Neo-Romantics, including George Rochberg and David Del Tredici.

In the 1980s Gothic rock inspired trends in fashion and in music. The early years of the decade also witnessed the rise of New Romanticism. Whereas the eighteenth-century Romantics had rebelled against Enlightenment didacticism, the New Romantics emerged to counteract the anarchic austerity of Punk. Successful bands such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC, Japan and Human League relied heavily on the use of synthesizers to produce their slick music, which some detractors felt was narcissistic and indulgent. Glamorous, flamboyant clothes were the order of the day, as the performers strove to achieve a personal look.

The impact of Romanticism upon the arts has been immense and ongoing. Romantic painters aimed for emotional intensity. Sometimes their pictures contained startlingly violent imagery, reflecting man’s smallness in the face of the vastness of the natural world, as in Gericault’s explicit and frightening ‘Raft of the Medusa’. However Romantic attitudes to nature worked on more than one level. Their affinity with the world around them was often evoked in their paintings, for example in the works of Constable. There are strong echoes of Romanticism in contemporary concerns about the environment and the need to appreciate and preserve it. Romantics also embraced the foreign and the exotic, especially eliciting an interest in Orientalism, and this too affected the history of art.

In sculpture there was a move to create imaginative pieces which would appeal to the emotions: Auguste Rodin tried to capture the inner lives of his subjects. In portraiture, painters began to explore the sitter’s feelings and psychological state, and pictures of animals were similarly probing. The Romantics revered children, because they were innocent and close to nature. Youngsters had tended to be included in family groups, dressed as young adults; but the Romantic approach was to depict them as real children, and to encourage society to be more child-centred.

Romanticism influenced political ideology, inviting engagement with the cause of the poor and oppressed and with ideals of social emancipation and progress. The individual was prized, but it was also felt that people were under an obligation to their fellow-men: personal commitment to the group was therefore important. Governments existed to serve the people. There was a feeling that people were actively part of the historical process, and could therefore contribute to social progress.

Early Romantics supported the French Revolution, although the terrible bloodshed in France caused Wordsworth, for example, to revise his opinions. Wars of self-determination appealed to Byron, who espoused Italian nationalism and advocated the liberation of the Greeks from the Turks. It seems to have been something of a Romantic trait to identify with such causes, and to get involved in foreign adventures. Similarly, in the twentieth-century the Spanish Civil War attracted ardent and idealistic supporters.

Romanticism did not supersede Enlightenment thought; rather it offered alternative outlooks and horizons. In promoting the imagination over reason, the Romantics encouraged individuals to experiment boldly, to question things instead of blindly accepting them. If we pause to think for a moment about the 1960s, this was a decade in which there was a renewed emphasis on Romanticism. The early Romantic innovative vision had clashed with classicism; in the 1960s there was again a striking opposition between tradition and counter-cultures, a desire to ‘get back to nature’, and many people were lured by Eastern mysticism. Rebelliousness and innovation were again manifest in many spheres of activity.

In some circumstances this was liberating and life-enhancing; however there has always been an underlying tension in Romanticism: it has a melancholic aspect, because Time is man’s enemy. There is a sense of the limitless potential of man, but also an awareness that life is transitory.

Lord Byron was larger than life, a living legend, and the early deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron enhanced these figures in the eyes of posterity, earning them iconic status. Heroic visionaries, battling on in spite of adverse circumstances, they invited admiration and empathy. Perhaps today’s passion for celebrity is very much in keeping with the spirit of Romanticism, and a number of media artistes have achieved immortality by virtue of their insistence on living life their way, seeking fulfilment on their own terms – whatever the outcome.

One thing is certain: the Romantic period marked a shift in the way people thought, and has continued to exert a decisive influence on the way we see and experience the world.

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1. Experiencing Literature: The Basics

The romantic period, 1820–1860: essayists and poets — american literature i, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles.

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some twenty years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing  Lyrical Ballads . In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of “the American Renaissance.”

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay “The Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one’s self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of “self”—which suggested selfishness to earlier generations—was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization,” “self-expression,” “self-reliance.”

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The “sublime”—an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop)—produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates—were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.

Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of nineteenth century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world—a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village thirty-two kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston’s lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem commemorating the battle, “Concord Hymn,” has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord was the first rural artist’s colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine,  The Dial , which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance ) and Fruitlands.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym—typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice – all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861–65) that American writers rose to the challenge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him “to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for thirty years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting “as if God were dead” and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.

Emerson’s philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson remarks: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas—the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation—are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past…? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne’s, “full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut.” He complained that Alcott’s abstract style omitted “the light that shines on a man’s hat, in a child’s spoon.”

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with “going to heaven in a swing.” Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem “Brahma” relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:

If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

This poem, published in the first number of the  Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: “Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma.”

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the nineteenth century had been Wordsworth’s poems and Emerson’s essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau’s masterpiece,  Walden , or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden , Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called “Economy,” he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.

In  Walden , Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau’s ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: “I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind.”

Thoreau’s method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.

In Walden , Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the nineteenth century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.

Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” while Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for black Americans’ civil rights in the twentieth century.

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His  Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.

A visionary book celebrating all creation,  Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by Emerson’s writings, especially his essay “The Poet,” which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet’s self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through “Song of Myself” like restless music:

My ties and ballasts leave me . . . I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision.

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman’s birds are not the conventional “winged spirits” of poetry. His “yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs.” Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, “Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any.” But he is equally the suffering individual, “The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on….I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs….I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken….”

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem.” When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the “open road.”

Whitman’s greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay “Democratic Vistas” (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism’s “Gilded Age.” In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its “mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry” that mask an underlying “dry and flat Sahara” of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population (“Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does”). Yet ultimately, Whitman’s main claim to immortality lies in “Song of Myself.” Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Whitman’s voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of “experimental,” or organic, form.

The Brahmin Poets

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning.

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the nineteenth century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the three thousand lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the  North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly .

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the “jingle man”). They were pillars of what was called the “genteel tradition” that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost one hundred years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850)

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book  Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century . It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial , which she edited from 1840 to 1842.

Fuller’s  Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of women’s role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of “self-dependence,” which women lack because “they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within.”

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all:

. . . Let us be wise and not impede the soul. . . . Let us have one creative energy. . . .Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the nineteenth century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.

Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects – a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.

A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense – To a discerning Eye – Much Sense – the starkest Madness – ‘Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail – Assent – and you are sane – Demur – you’re straightway dangerous And handled with a chain –

Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson’s 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R. P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson’s poetry sometimes feels as if “a cat came at us speaking English.” Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

• The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets. From Outline of American Literature. Authored by : Katherine VanSpanckeren. Located at : http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ENGL405-1.1.1-The-Romantic-Period-1820-to-1860-Essayists-and-Poets.pdf . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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Romanticism Essay | Essay on Romanticism for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Romanticism Essay:  Romanticism was an artistic, intellectual, literary and musical movement that took place in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century and mid-nineteenth century. This artistic movement was at its peak in most areas in the approximate period of 1800 to 1850.

The prominence can characterise Romanticism it gave to emotional sensitivity and individual subjectivity along with the glorification of all the nature and past preferring the medieval rather than the classical. For Romantics, imagination was the most important creative faculty, rather than reason.

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Long and Short Essays on Romanticism for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Romanticism for reference.

Long Essay on Romanticism 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Romanticism is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Romanticism was an artistic period of attitude or intellectual orientation that was characterised by several works of literature music, painting, architecture, criticism and historiography in the Western Civilisation over a time period from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century.

Romanticism was first defined as the aesthetic in literary criticism around the 1800s, and it gained momentum as an artistic movement in Britain and France. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the political norms and noble social of the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific rationalisation of nature – all elements of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in literature, visual arts and music but had a major impact on chess, natural sciences, social sciences and education. It also had a remarkable and complex effect on politics with the romantic thinkers influencing nationalism, liberalism, conservatism and radicalism.

Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the perception of harmony, order, calm, idealisation, balance and rationality. This typified Classism in general and Neoclassicism in particular in the late 18th century. Romanticism was also an aftermath of the French Revolution that took place in 1789. Even though often predicted as the opposition of Neoclassicism, early stages of Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, Baron Antoine Jean Gros and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

The movement emphasised on intense emotions serving as an authentic source of an aesthetic experience. It gave a new emphasis to emotions such as horror, terror, apprehension and awe – especially those experienced in confronting the unique aesthetic characteristics of sublimity and nature’s beauty. Contrasting to Classicism and Rationalism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism brought back medievalism. It also brought back the elements of art and narrative perceived as truthfully medieval in the attempt at escaping population growth, industrialism and early urban sprawl. Although this artistic movement was rooted in German Sturm and Drang movement, in which emotion and intuition were preferred to the rationalism of Enlightenment, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution also served as proximate factors. It elevated ancient customs and folklore to something noble but also spontaneity as a helpful characteristic.

Romanticism gave a high value to the achievements of ‘heroic’ artists and individualists, whose example it maintained would raise the quality of the society. It also helped in promoting the individual an individual’s imagination as a critical authority gave the freedom of classical notions of forms in art. The period of Romanticism had a few elements which stood out in the Western Civilisation. Romantics had belief in individuals and the common man, and they shared their love for nature. Romanticism showed interest in the past, supernatural, gothic and bizarre things. They had great faith in the inner experience and the power of imagination.

There was a strong recourse to the natural and historical inevitability – a spirit o the age in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Realism was offered, which served as the polar opposite of Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism started during this time which was associated with multiple processes, including political and social changes and spread of nationalism.

Short Essay on Romanticism 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Romanticism is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Romanticism was an intellectual as well as an artistic movement that occurred in Europe between the period of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Recognised broadly as a break from the Enlightenment’s guiding principles – which confirmed reason as the foundation of all the knowledge – the Romantic Movement emphasised on the importance of individual subjectivity and emotional sensitivity.

The nature of the Romantic Movement may be approached with the primary importance of free expression of the artist’s feelings. To express the feelings of the artists, Romantics believed that the content of the art should come from the imagination of the artist. Not specifically for Romanticism, there was widespread strong belief importance give to nature. This particularly affected the nature of the artist’s work, when the artist was surrounded by it – preferably alone. Contrary to the very social art of the Enlightenment, the Romantics were distrustful of the world, tended to be in close connection with nature.

10 Lines on Romanticism in English

• Romanticism is not an era that can be easily defined by its techniques.
• The principles of the age characterise this movement.
• Over science, reason and industrialisation Romanticism gave importance to spiritualism, emotions and nature.
• This period of artistic movement focused on freedom from authority over a traditional focus on society.
• The period of Neoclassicism corresponds with Romanticism only in the period.
• The ideals of the two movements Romanticism and Neoclassicism, were the direct opposite.
• Romantic music was technically adventurous and highly innovative.
• Along with showing the power of nature, many Romantic artists used their paintings to showcase natural disasters.
• Most famous Romantic art depicting natural disaster was The Raft of Medusa – a masterpiece by Theodore Gericault’s.
• Several paintings of the era dipped into fairy tales folklore and mythology for inspiration.

FAQ’s on Romanticism Essay

Question 1. Which is the largest defining painting of the era?

Answer: Francisco Goya’s painting El Tres de Mayo 1808 (May 3) is considered one of the largest defining paintings of the era.

Question 2.  What did Romanticism focus on?

Answer: Romanticism emphasised nature, emotions, individuality and spiritualism over industrialisation, science and reasoning.

Question 3. When did Romanticism begin?

Answer: The Romantic Movement began approximately in the year 1770.

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The Romantic Movement

Also another thought that was at the wake of romanticism were the words of the French revolution emphasizing liberty, freedom, and individuality as well as the need in England to escape what the industrial revolution was doing to the country. There are many people and expressions either art, thought, or music that made the romantic period what is was. There are however key people who are involved in cementing certain expressions. Many writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and George Gordan, Lord Bryant, classified the Romantic period.

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